PHP RFC: Replacing current json extension with jsond

Version: 0.2

Date: 2015-01-01

Author: Jakub Zelenka, bukka@php.net

Status: Implemented (PHP 7.0)

Introduction

The current Json Parser in the json extension does not have a free license which is a problem for many Linux distros. This has been referenced at Bug #63520. That results in not packaging json extension in the many Linux distributions.

The extension code is very old and without a maintainer which makes it difficult for further improvements. There also are some implementation decisions that makes the performance worse than it should be (see benchmarks).

Proposal

The proposal is to replace the current json extension with code that is based on the PECL jsond extension (it's not exactly the same code as there are some modifications for PHP 7).